Dh sent me this note, I just shook my head, Silly peaple, we could have thousands and thousands of pds of fruit produced in city every single year, and instead we have a program that is helping make peaple sick in record numbers.. So glad that we picked and planted all our tree’s and bushes with food production in mind.

OTTAWA — There’s a biological war of the sexes raging in Ottawa’s trees, and people with pollen allergies are the casualties.

A huge majority of the trees here — and in many Canadian and U.S. cities — are male.

Female trees are messy. They are the ones whose flowers go on to produce nuts, seed pods, apples and other seed-carrying debris that people don’t like to sweep up off decks and patios or scoop out of clogged eavestroughs.

So growers have switched to supplying male trees, which don’t produce seeds.

Instead, the male trees produce pollen. And that aggravates allergies.

Tom Ogren, a horticulturalist from California, came to Ottawa this week as part of a cross-Canada tour sponsored by the makers of Reactine allergy medicine.

The average male tree produces an amount of pollen equal in weight to the female tree’s seeds, he says. But the pollen is mostly invisible.

Ogren doesn’t have allergies, but his wife of 45 years does. Years ago this gave him the idea of searching for the most pollen-free plants for his own home, and eventually for other people as well. He writes books on the subject.

But a funny thing happened when he went out to shoot pictures of male and females samples of each species. Near his California home he had trouble find the females.

“I thought maybe my city was unusual,” he said in an interview. But the same weirdly skewed population showed up in city after city — anywhere that the trees had been purchased from growers instead of growing naturally. It doesn’t occur in rural areas or small towns.

Ogren calls it “botanical sexism,” and he says it contributes to needless suffering by anyone with allergies to tree pollens.

On Wednesday, he toured Ottawa to see what kinds of trees we have in our parks, schoolyards, nurseries and streets.

In a word, they’re male. At least most of the time.

That goes for a huge variety of trees and shrubs — juniper, horse chestnut, katsura, yew, ginkgo, ash, oak, aspen, poplar, honey locust, Manitoba maple, mulberry, and on down the list.

In some cases growers have even found a way to produce “all-male” versions of a tree that’s naturally both male and female, he said.

The locust, for example, naturally produces male branches and female branches on the same tree. It doesn’t occur in nature in an all-male or all-female version. But growers have learned to cut off a male branch and clone it, producing new trees without female branches.

Manitoba maple isn’t usually planted here, so he suspects the male majority came through “chainsaw selection” when people cut the trees that drop seeds and leave the seedless (male) trees standing.

The emerald ash borer infestation leaves Ottawa at a crossroads, he notes.

“I’ve driven through Ohio, and just about every ash tree they have — green ash, black ash, white ash — is either dead or dying” from the emerald ash borer infestation.

Ottawa’s urban forest is about one-quarter ash, “and I expect the emerald ash borer is going to do a number on most of them.”

That leaves the question of what to replant. Go with more female trees for a healthier environment, he suggests. Not only do they not produce pollen, but they attract it and clean the air of the tiny particles, and even smaller particles of airborne soot from vehicles that cling to them.